Eggs in a Row

Let us up, baseball. Enough with your smirky little moral lessons. Quit sticking it to our expectations. Be done with your creepy holdings back and insane grandpa reversals and bestowings. Or else don’t: I give up.

Boston, site of the worst sports news of the year, back in April, got some balm yesterday when the Patriots’ rock-star quarterback Tom Brady threw a twilight game-winning, seventeen-yard touchdown completion to Kenbrell Thompkins, to topple the previously undefeated New Orleans Saints, 30–27, with five seconds remaining. Later on, at Fenway Park, David Ortiz hit an eighth-inning, first-pitch line-drive grand-slam home run into the Boston bullpen, tying the American League Championship second game against the visiting Tigers, 5–5. The Sox won in the ninth, evening that best-of-seven series at a game apiece. Big Papi’s blast was frantically pursued by the Tiger right fielder Torii Hunter, who managed a leap for it at the fence, barely missing the catch, and then vanished scarily, head first over the barrier and almost into the arms of a Boston bullpen catcher. His amputated, upside-down legs in the air made a better victory image, all in all, than Thompkins’s up-reaching arms in early polling, but that happy debate can stretch on, of course, until something else comes along.

Great stuff, but not wholly unexpected, since the hairy Sox possessed almost every American League offensive record this year. What should give pleasure, though, what’s still to value, is what the Tigers’ pitching had done before this, which was to limit the Sox to one lone hit and no runs in the previous day’s 1–0 Detroit win, and hold them hitless and runless again on this day until the sixth. That silencing matters; that’s how this game is supposed to work. Anibal Sanchez, the Detroit starter in Game 1, threw every one of his hundred and sixteen pitches up and down and around the borders of the strike zone, walking six batters in the process but leaving the center of the space as pristine as an eighteenth-century museum mirror. (Something similarly austere had gone on over at the second N.L.C.S. game, in St. Louis, where the Cardinals beat the Dodgers, 1–0, while managing only two hits on their own behalf.) Max Scherzer, the Tigers’ starting, 21–3 right-hander yesterday, shut down the Sox with his customary variety show of pitches, nothing repeated in speed or pace or location from pitch to pitch and inning to inning, and nary a hit until Victorino’s single in the sixth. Those fourteen goose eggs in a row were hard on the locals, God knows—with the oval faces of the motionless, packed-in Fenway multitudes suggesting only a vast fingerprint file—but they set up the party.

Baseball is constantly under attack for its slowness and irrelevance—there was another deep-water essay along these lines in the Times not long ago—but its central strength isn’t constant competitive excitement or even sweet tradition; it’s difficulty. Nothing in sports is harder—nothing else comes close—than hitting a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball or an angling cutter or a dipping splitter, unless it’s throwing a hundred and thirty-odd of these barely out of reach of the hulking, brilliantly talented sluggers’ swings, while in the process silencing a home crowd’s raucous cheers and expectations to an anxious, grudging, and admiring silence. That’s what we’ve seen so far here, along with the frailty of the Detroit bullpen. Thanks, guys.

Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

Roger Angell, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956. He is the author of “Late Innings.”